For patients suffering from bedsores, lying in one position for too long a time on an ordinary mattress will worsen the injury due to continuous pressure applied to soft tissues. In order to improve the situation, medical organizations usually replaces ordinary mattresses with airbeds or air mattresses, by which proper pressure redistribution or adjustment can alleviate local pressure concentration of the mattresses and increase lying comfort of the patients.
When there is an emergency to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on the patient, however, rapid deflation of the airbed is essential, and the air discharge device of the airbed is much important.
For some conventional airbeds, rubber plugs are used to block air discharge orifices and are unplugged or removed to deflate the airbeds. It is time-consuming and unsatisfactory to deflate the larger airbed just by removal of rubber plugs. Therefore, some airbeds are equipped with a one-way air discharge valve to facilitate deflation. Compared with rubber plugs, one-way air discharge valves are more convenient and efficient for deflation, because air in the airbed can be discharged or released by simply switching the air discharge valve to the ON position, providing more desirable deflation or air discharge performance.
In order to enable convenient operation, most air discharge valves are arranged at the periphery or lateral side of the airbed during the assembly or production of an airbed such as by arranging a rotary cover and a rotary base of the air discharge valve at two opposite sides of the bedspread fabric. Accordingly, when a patient gets into or off the airbed or moves along the airbed, the rotary cover may be easily moved or rotated due to the stretched bedspread fabric, making the rotary cover drive the rotary base to move or rotate relative to the pipe connection base and resulting in mis-switching of the valve and unintentional deflation. Thus, the conventional air discharge valve needs to be handled with extreme care.
Accordingly, there is a need for an air discharge valve which could effectively prevent mis-operation or mis-switching of users.